Chapter 63 Eight o’clock sharp

Chapter 63 Eight o’clock sharp
Cole pointed at the two chairs before we had fully walked through the door.
She was already at her desk with three folders open and a pen in her hand and the look of someone who had been working since before the city woke up. She finished writing, capped the pen, and looked at us both.
"Richard's lawyer pushed for the early date because they believe speed catches us short," she said. "They are wrong. But the next three weeks will not be comfortable for either of you and I need you to understand that before we start."
She walked us through it without pause. Depositions first, mine taking the longest, two days minimum going through everything from the first year of the marriage to the morning of the arrest. Then Bruno's, shorter but more technical, focused on Monaco and the documents and the chain of evidence Cole had spent eleven months building.
"His lawyers will go after you personally," she said to me. "They will suggest you knew about the shell company. They will suggest Bruno used you. They will try to make twelve years of documented control look like a pattern you invented." She held my gaze. "None of it will stick. But it will be said in front of a jury and juries are human and I need you steady."
"She is steady," Bruno said.
Cole looked at him the way she looked at everyone, directly and without sentiment.
"I need her to tell me that," she said.
I looked at Cole.
"I have been in a room with Richard Simpson when he was at his worst and I stayed standing," I said. "A courtroom is not going to break me."
Cole looked at me for a long moment.
"Good," she said. And moved on.
Two hours later we were back on the street with the morning cold and sharp around us and Bruno's hand finding mine as we walked.
We did not talk about the deposition or the trial or any of it for the first block.
Then Bruno said, "Breakfast."
"We had coffee at Cole's," I said.
"That was not breakfast," he said. "That was survival."
We found a place nearby, a small restaurant with steamed-up windows and a handwritten menu on a board above the counter. Bruno ordered eggs without looking at the board and I ordered the same and we sat at a corner table and the food came fast and hot and we ate properly for the first time since my mother's house.
Halfway through Bruno looked up at me.
"Tell me you are actually alright," he said. "Not the version for Cole."
I set my fork down.
"I keep thinking about what his lawyers are going to say about me in that room," I said. "The version of me they build for the jury. Someone who knew, who participated, who invented a history of abuse to cover her own involvement." I looked at the table. "I know it will not hold. Cole has everything. But I also know what it feels like to have someone describe you to a room full of people and have none of it match who you actually are." I looked up at him. "Richard has been doing that to me for twelve years. A courtroom is just a bigger audience."
Bruno looked at me.
"You are not going into that room alone," he said.
"I know," I said.
"I will be there every day," he said. "Every session. Every time his lawyers open their mouths and say something that is not you I will be sitting behind you and you will know I am there."
I held his gaze.
"That helps," I said.
"Good," he said. He picked up his fork. "Eat your eggs."
I almost laughed and he saw it and the corner of his mouth moved and we finished breakfast and paid and went back out into the morning.
The easel was in a box by the apartment door when we got back, delivered while we were out. Bruno carried it inside and set it up in the south-facing room and I stood in the doorway and looked at it in the clean morning light.
He had ordered canvas too. It was on the shelf, three sizes, still wrapped. And new brushes in a paper bag beside them because he had looked up what I needed before I had thought to look myself.
I did not say anything about that.
I crossed the room and kissed him instead and he pulled me close and kissed me back and the room was warm and the light was good and the canvas was on the shelf waiting.
When I pulled back I looked at him.
"Go," he said. "I will make coffee and leave you alone."
"Stay," I said. "Sit in the corner."
He looked at the corner.
There was no chair in it yet.
He went to the hallway and came back with a chair and put it in the corner and sat in it and crossed his legs and looked at me with complete patience.
I turned to the wall and picked up a pencil.
I sketched without planning. A man at forty with one hand raised mid-gesture. A garden in winter. A row of bare rose canes against a wall. The rough lines came fast and certain the way they always had before Richard told me it was a bad habit and I had believed him and stopped.
I did not stop now.
Bruno was very quiet in the corner.
I worked for an hour without speaking and he sat without moving and the morning light shifted across the floor between us and the room filled with the particular energy of someone making something and someone who loves them watching.
I stepped back.
Three figures roughed out on the wall. Not finished. Not even close. But true.
Bruno stood from the corner and came and looked at it over my shoulder.
His hand rested on my back.
"Keep going," he said quietly.
His phone rang on the windowsill.
We both looked at it.
Cassano.
Bruno picked it up and looked at me and I looked at him and the room was warm and the pencil was in my hand and outside the city was loud and ordinary and Cassano's name sat on the screen between us and the morning that had been good a moment ago shifted slightly around its edges.
Bruno answered.
He listened for forty seconds without speaking and his hand dropped from my back and I watched his face and what I saw there was not the controlled professional steadiness and was not fear and was not anything I could immediately name except that it made me put the pencil down.
He ended the call.
"What?" I said.
He looked at me.
"Cassano is withdrawing his cooperation with Cole's unit," he said. "Completely. Every statement, every document, everything he provided over the last eleven months." He paused. "He is doing it this morning. Before the trial."
I stared at him.
"Why?" I said.
"Because someone got to him last night," Bruno said. "Someone above Cassano's level who Richard has been connected to since before Monaco and whose name has never once appeared in any document we have seen."
"Who?" I said.
Bruno looked at me.
"That is what Cassano just told me," he said. "And Phoebe, if it is true, Cole's entire case has a hole in it large enough to walk Richard through."